


A Glass Darkly

by englishable



Series: Hieros Gamos [7]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-20 03:41:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19369141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: The sunglasses Thor wears are a curious new feature. Sif wonders whether they are mostly to keep something out or to keep something in.(She suspects it's probably both.)





	A Glass Darkly

…

The sunglasses are made from a polarized celluloid acetate, although Sif has lived long enough to remember when the mortals wore them made from smoky quartz or cut emeralds. She is familiar with the curious little devices in their modern incarnation due to her work amongst the agents of SHIELD but cannot determine their appeal.

“But don’t they make you run into things?” she asks.

“Not usually.” Thor reclines expansively in the Benatar’s co-pilot chair beside her. Quill has offered Sif one of the other seats to sleep on, since she has found herself feeling crowded and enclosed by her bunk in the berth, and Thor has come down onto the flight deck to sit with her. “The more pertinent question is why I should feel compelled to go running anywhere in the first place without good cause.”

Sif swipes the glasses off his nose and holds them against her eyes. The blinking control panel and the starfield beyond the window are transformed as though by a solar eclipse and everything becomes a shadowed, muted negation of itself, her arms and her hands and the face of Thor sitting next to her. Together with the long hair and the full beard, the shadowing half-light gives his face the strange solemnity of a prophet in the wilderness.

She studies him.

On occasion he will fiddle with these glasses while he talks over something with her, folding and unfolding their earpieces as he tries to make sense out of the various irregular pieces into which he has been broken. He wears the glasses tipped back on his forehead to keep the long, still somewhat poorly-tended hair off his face.  Once Sif had taken the glasses and lifted them playfully up, as though sneaking a glance beneath the visor of a soldier’s helmet, to see that he was not wearing his prosthetic right eye and that his left eye was red-rimmed and watering; Thor had smiled at her anyway.

(Rocket has told Sif the other parts to the story, the parts Thor has not told her himself: about bearing the full force of the neutron star to cast Stormbreaker, about his offer to use the gauntlet and the stones.

“It would’ve been fair,” Thor had explained, eventually. “It was all my doing in the first place and it should’ve been my hand that undid it – it should have been me.”)

Now she lifts the sunglasses off her face. The colors of the world flare up again around her.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I think I’d still rather be able to know where I’m going.”

“That’s presuming anyone knows where they’re going, of course.” Thor holds his hands laced across his belly and circles his thumbs around one another as he thinks. “I’m starting to doubt it.”

“We haven’t got much choice in the matter, have we? It’s either forwards or backwards.”

“That depends which way you’re looking.”

She clenches and opens her weakened sword-hand several times. When she first awoke with five years vanished, her body reformed out of dust and ashes, it was the thing she did before even trying to remember her name.

“It depends more on which path you’ve taken,” she says. “If it’s the wrong one, going backwards may work out to be a kind of forwards in the end.”

His fingers stop. She studies his profile, the ridge of his brow and the slight boyish lift at the end of his nose. “And what does it mean if you’re standing still?” he asks.

“That you’re wherever you need to be, I suppose – at least for that particular moment.”

Thor turns his head towards her. Sif leans across the space between their seats, feeling suddenly tired and with a sharp pain lodged under her breastbone, and slides the dark glasses gently over his eyes again.

When he says nothing further she draws the thin blanket up around her shoulders, rolls over and closes her eyes, although she does not fall asleep until she hears him stand and walk away.

…

He spends three days on Earth conferring with Banner and a boy named Peter Parker; he comes back with a series of cassette tapes at Quill’s request, a packet of something coarsely-ground and fragrant that he tells Sif is called coffee, and a pair of sunglasses sporting pink-tinted lenses and silver frames shaped like candy hearts. 

He stands very close to fit them around Sif’s ears and she stands very still while he does it. She raises her eyebrows at him when he finishes.

“It’s a saying the mortals have.” He lowers his hands and steps back. “‘Wearing rose-colored glasses.’”

“Oh.” She adjusts the sunglasses to balance them more evenly over her nose and glances rapidly about herself. Their lenses give everything a blushed shade like seashells and apple blossoms and morning clouds, and it strikes her as such a lovely and delightfully silly compliment that she can feel the enjoyment of it in her toes. She smiles. “What does it mean?”

“It –” but if Thor is readying to make a joke, here, he falters into a long silence as he looks at her; when he speaks again his voice sounds different. “It means you’re a far better friend than I’ve ever been worthy of, probably.”

“Why’s that?”

“I fear you’ve always seen me as being a little better than I really am.”

“Have I?” She tilts the glasses down to study him face-to-face over their lenses, tilts them back up and then down a second time. “Well, if these are meant to be some kind of magic, I should warn you it’s a rather weak spell. You look exactly the same either way.”

And she does not understand why Thor steps in closer again and nearly picks her off her feet in the embrace he gives her, which sinks her quite comfortably against his warm, heavy body but also knocks the sunglasses crooked on her face; when Thor finally lets her go he fidgets with them until they are straightened.

…

After this he gets in the funny habit of lifting the sunglasses away from his eyes whenever he looks at her, although he does not tell Sif why until she asks him.

“So I can see you properly,” Thor says. “I don’t believe I’ve ever done it until now.”

…


End file.
